The Pirate Bay Is Now the World's Number 1 File Sharing Site

While The Pirate Pay is certainly notorious, it's always oddly lingered in the mid-table when it comes to real-world file sharing. No longer, though: according to fresh analysis by Torrent Freak, the site has now sailed into the top spot as the world's most-used file sharing site.

While that is in part down to a gradual increase in the number of people visiting the site, Torrent Freak points out the real reason behind the success is in fact the fall in popularity of one-click hosting sites, like 4Shared, following the shutdown of Megaupload.

Less than two years ago those one-click download sites ruled the roost by a significant margin, and The Pirate Bay sat at a lowly sixth place. But since the Megaupload shutdown, most cyberlockers have implemented measures to keep pirates at bay—and seen a massive decline in user base as a result. Now, half of the top 10 file-sharing sites are BitTorrent-based, compared to just two back in 2011.

The figures—which include just English-language file-sharing sites—were calculated using several traffic comparison and analytic tools, according to Torrent Freak, including Compete, Quantcast and Alexa. You can see the leader table below, or read more over on Torrent Freak. [Torrent Freak]